'It sent us down all kinds of wormholes': Bicep's secret dancefloor weapons

The Northern Irish duo have become one of the biggest acts in dance music – partly thanks to their DJ sets of ultra-obscure house and disco. They lift the lid of the darkest corners of their record collection

Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar are dance music royalty, playing alongside house music’s biggest names and making waves with their new self-titled debut album. The former schoolfriends from Belfast are also scholars of dance culture: before their success as DJs they had built a reputation with their blog, Feel My Bicep. Since 2008, FMB has showcased the pair’s obsessive trawling of record shops and online sources for unknown club music oddities across the decades – this collectors’ mania has influenced a generation, and it has given Bicep’s music an extraordinary maturity. We asked them to pick their 10 favourite curios from the deepest corners of their record boxes.

Matt: “This one goes back to sixth form. We went to a club called Shine in Belfast, which was super-hard techno, and we’d also meet up in our mate’s garage, which had old sofas in. We brought tapes or downloaded mixes – our way of sharing music – and someone brought a mix by Ewan Pearson with this on. This felt super-weird and super-mellow, in contrast to the straight-ahead club music we were into. But all of our friends went mad for it, and it [marked] a big start for us digging into more leftfield stuff and, from there, starting the blog.”

Bicep: the bloggers who became house music heroes

Andy: “A few of our mates went to university in Glasgow, and we’d meet up at [the club night] Optimo there once or twice a year. This track was one people were raving about after Padded Cell played live there, and it sums up the Optimo aesthetic: it’s got rock elements, funk, disco and experimentalism, but it’s still party music. Those nights were a big influence on us, [helping us] realise you could bring really eclectic tastes together and somehow make it work.”

Andy: “This is all about happy accident. One of the DJs from Shine was selling off a load of vinyl for £1 a record, and the one good one we bought was on Slide, a tiny label from Belfast. Then we dug through their catalogue and found this, and discovered Clive Moore is from right round the corner from us! It’s a cool disco-loop house track. I have never heard anyone play it, but it absolutely smashes the place when we do.”

Matt: “We found this artist through a blog called 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which covers a lot of weirdo stuff – goth and metal and Italian horror-film soundtracks – and was one of the inspirations for our blog. It’s also where we discovered Brassica, one of our favourite artists on our label. This one is the sort of track I don’t think you’d find in a record shop – it’s emotional, but also dark and synthy, not an obvious dance track. It gave us a thirst for this kind of sound, and sent us down all kinds of wormholes.”

Andy: “In New Zealand, we found a store piled with CDs for 50p. We were buying documentary soundtracks and stuff for sampling, then saw a trance compilation with a cool sleeve. When we got it home, we discovered this absolute gem on it. There is no information, nothing online about the artist, the track was only ever on this one CD compilation. It is the digger’s holy grail to have a track that nobody’s heard of.”

Matt: “This one is from when we started properly touring, DJing every week. We were only playing vinyl for the first two or three years, and this is one we’d always wanted, a super soulful, old deep house track from 1992. It was £60, but we thought, let’s bite the bullet and do it!”

Andy: “We didn’t have much money, and that was six records’ worth, but the price was creeping up, so we saved for it. We were so excited, then the first night we played it we scratched it, right in a key moment of the track. Totally unplayable! Now, as soon as we get a new record we rip it to digital immediately.”

Andy: “A really gorgeous, slow, emotional tune like this a nice way to reset everything. I remember opening a set with this after the DJ had been banging out techno solidly. We were nervous, because it was one of our first gigs at Panorama, but just after the intro there was a huge scream from the crowd. It was such a relief.”

Andy: “I can’t remember the original [version] of this; I think it is super-cheesy, trance-type stuff. But I couldn’t believe the dynamic and the huge pianos of this remix. It’s probably the biggest track on this list: it gets an insane reaction, yet no DJs we play alongside ever put it on. I dropped it near the end of a set at Panorama Bar and so many people were pulling our T-shirts going, ‘What is it?’ That makes all those hours and hours of digging for tracks and hearing nothing worthwhile to get a huge reaction like that.”

Andy: “This is all about the drums, the amazing way the 909 [drum machine] is used. Our mate Alex Bradley, who ran parties called Love Fever in east London, is a big collector, and he introduced me to Needs. It’s way more coherent as a piece than most 90s house, with these amazing ARP [synthesiser] parts bringing it all together. We’d play this at Robert Johnson [a club near Frankfurt].”

Matt: “The DJ booth there is between the indoor dancefloor and a huge balcony with all windows behind you. As the sun comes up, with people moving around on both sides of you, is one of the few times it completely makes sense to play a 14-minute track in full.”

Matt: “This comes round full circle. Back in those Shine days, when we were 16, maybe early 17, I was given this by a girlfriend. She was trying to buy a rock album, but accidentally bought Analogue Bubblebath, Vol 3. As a result, I spent sixth-form computer lessons trawling through music sites, trying to find anything by Aphex Twin. I’d gone from metal and punk to techno easily, but then suddenly I found this whole world of deep and strange music. For me, this track symbolises having your horizons opened.”